UX Design in Web Design

04 Oct

UX has recently become a buzzword in the design industry but that’s not really a bad thing, especially in our world of web design. Incorporating UX Design into how we design websites is an invaluable process and it means the world to potential customers using the website.

What is UX Design?

If you haven’t already opened a new tab to ask Google what UX Design is, quite simply it’s User Experience Design or, designing with the user in mind. A UX Designer will study user behaviour and work to understand a user’s motivations so they can design better digital experiences.

UX Design takes the user, the business, and technology, considers all their wants and needs and then finds a happy and healthy middle ground for them to coexist in. Using UX in web design in its essence is; considering the features on the website, how users will use or interact with them, and how products or content should be organised for users to find them.

Why incorporate UX in Web Design?

First impressions are critical on websites. It takes 0.05 seconds for a user to make a judgement about your website and normally they’re judging your credibility based on the design. There’s some obvious no-nos in web design: providing a list of links to your pages, entirely left aligned content, and yucky fonts — to name a few. These missteps will give a bad first impression but even without glaringly obvious design blunders you can scare users away.

Consider Generation Now, if you’re looking to find something online a lot of the time it won’t come down to a heap of thorough research. It’ll come down to what’s easy to find, is reasonably priced, and of course, doesn’t look scammy. So implementing UX principles means you can communicate your brand’s tone and personality to the user visually, the content on your website is organised in an easy-to-digest way, and the user can navigate through your website with little to no thought or effort.

How does it work?

UX Design philosophies, principles, and techniques are based off product and user research. This comes from observing user behaviour, interviewing users, and analysing feedback from users. This data is collated and continuously updated so we can always have a good idea of how users are using and interacting with online platforms.

Let’s use a website from 2005 as an example.

You might’ve had a button titled ‘Services’ that would lead to a page titled Services that scrolled forever and listed all 15 of the services your business provides with a blurb under each heading. With UX Design and the innovation of web design, we’d now have a drop down bar for your services and a button for each service. If the ‘Services’ page were content-heavy we’d break the copy up with images or multimedia, because UX has taught us people are deterred by seeing large blocks of content.

The end result?

The end result of incorporating UX into web design is a fully functioning website that works like it’s built for a purpose — because it is. It follows a structure and flows in a natural pattern. The design is relevant (it’s not a pink and purple website representing an engineering firm), it’s easy to navigate through, and it’s accessible and organised.